Wings Over Scotland

That doesn’t happen terribly often.

But on this matter, we simply can’t find fault with her logic.

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As a child, I hated Alex Salmond.

He was everything I was raised to despise: most people around me were generally suspicious of his motives, the Daily Record painted him as a contemptible human being, and Prime Minister Tony Blair urged my country and I to reject his insane plans to split up the cuddly, all-encompassing United Kingdom.

As a youngster growing up in pre-devolution Scotland, still bearing the deep scars of Thatcherism, I almost viewed Blair as a God of sorts (I think he did too).

Here was a man who had dramatically ended 18 years of Tory rule, delivered a landslide Labour government that was finally in (apparent) line with the wishes of the Scottish people, and he’d even given us a nice shiny new Parliament to play with. What wasn’t to like?

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Defence Secretary Phillip Hammond on independence in the Mail on Sunday:

“It is a real dagger poised at the heart of Scotland’s industrial infrastructure.”

And here’s our old pal Adolf “One Nation” Hitler in 1938, before his first invasion:

“Czechoslovakia is a dagger pointed at the heart of Germany.”

It’s looking increasingly as if someone at “Better Together” got a copy of “Speak Like A Nazi” for their birthday. We await their increased abrasiveness with some concern.

Here’s the BBC’s chief political correspondent Norman Smith on the surprise sacking of Michael Moore as Secretary of State for Scotland, having clearly been extensively and expertly briefed on the Scottish political situation by researchers beforehand.

(Click the image for the full audio.)

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Not for the first time, we had to check that this really came from “Better Together”, not some cybernat satire site, but again it’s bona fide hypocrisy par excellence.

This really is what the No camp is trying to shovel, in the guise of a pseudo-socialist appeal made in the name of three political parties in hock to big business up to their eyeballs, in a campaign funded chiefly by a multi-millionaire oil executive with links to Saddam Hussein and the genocidal Serbian war criminal Arkan.

What, the big banks that, under the watchful eye of the Union and successive Westminster governments, were allowed such free rein for their dodgy dealings that they almost destroyed the entire UK economy, for which nobody’s ever been held to account, and which are still pocketing billions of pounds of our money in bonuses every year even though they’re owned by the taxpayer?

THOSE really big banks?

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We must admit, we’re baffled by the Daily Mail’s sudden and extraordinary attack on Ralph Miliband, the long-dead father of Ed and David. If there’s any publication on Earth you’d think WOULDN’T feel on very solid ground lecturing other people on stuff they said in the 1930s and 1940s, you might imagine the Daily Mail would be it.

We can’t for the life of us work out what the right-wing hatezine thinks it could possibly have to gain from such a hysterical, vile assault, which even most Conservatives are disassociating themselves from in embarrassment.

The current Labour leader has often spoken of his rejection of his father’s strong left-wing views (indeed, he does so in the rebuttal the Mail has, albeit with the greatest of ill-grace, published today), so goodness knows what the paper is trying to achieve.

Other than, perhaps, to tempt Labour into displays of gross hypocrisy.

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This man only controls the finances of Scotland because Scotland is part of the UK.

Never forget that if you listen to Labour and vote No next September, there’s (at least) a 60% chance that he’ll control the finances of Scotland until 2020. Ready to risk it?

We’re genuinely baffled by Ed Miliband’s big conference showstopper announcement this week that a Labour government would freeze people’s utility bills for a year and a half. Channel 4’s Fact Check is extremely sceptical that it can be done at all. The energy companies are predictably furious and making all manner of dire threats.

But what we really don’t get is what the point of it is.

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Ed Miliband delivered just under 8,000 words to the Labour Party conference in Brighton yesterday. Of those, just 263 of them concerned Scotland. (The actual word “Scotland” was never uttered.) Here are all of them.

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Daily Record hack Torcuil Crichton has had another curious memory lapse in the paper today, in a dramatic piece headlined “Labour will axe Atos if we return to power, vows shadow work and pensions minister Liam Byrne”. A Record insider leaked us this redacted image of the original draft version:

Can you supply the missing words?

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[We’ve got something special for those of you who can’t make it to the march in Edinburgh today (or are reading en route). Julie McDowall pens the Herald’s brilliant online dating blog, but there’s a lot more to her writing than that.]

There is a groove on my skull. I can run my fingertip along it.

On your first day in a call centre they present you with a headset. You might chuckle when you first wear it, pretending to be Madonna or a helicopter pilot. But the chuckles die at the end of the shift when you lift the metal band and ruffle your hair, feeling the dent on your head.

And it can hurt, so you start to unclamp the contraption between calls and hang it round your neck, but a manager is soon gesturing wildly at you with the ‘hood up’ signal. Get that metal band clamped back onto your head. You may not remove it.

After a few years, a permanent line is engraved on your skull. You are branded.

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